Woman pulls rig 100 feet for charity

Monday

Jul 22, 2013 at 2:00 AMJul 22, 2013 at 11:42 AM

When you first see Billie-Jean Mcloughlin of Matamoras, Pa., you can tell she's into body building. But she takes it one step further. Mcloughlin, 48, is a competitor in the North American Strongman/Strong Woman Inc. competitions.

Donna Kessler

When you first see Billie-Jean Mcloughlin of Matamoras, Pa., you can tell she's into body building. But she takes it one step further. Mcloughlin, 48, is a competitor in the North American Strongman/Strong Woman Inc. competitions.

These competitions are like no others. Competitors lift heavy stones, huge, cumbersome logs, they flip gigantic excavator tires down a course and more. Mcloughlin is committed to her sport and has never placed lower than second place. But she not only uses her brute strength to compete. She uses it to help charities and charitable causes and to show what a woman can accomplish.

Mcloughlin is an EMT for Westfall Fire and Rescue Department 30 and she also likes to ride her Harley. She has become a regular at O'Toole's Harley-Davidson in Wurtsboro, which sponsors a few of her competitions.

When she heard about the need for donations for O'Toole's annual toy drive, she knew she wanted to help. Mcloughlin pitched the idea of a one-woman truck pull to owners Dan Tandy and Tom "Digs" Verdiglione. The guys jumped on it. Wurtsboro HOG members helped pave the way for the event to take place and the Village of Wurtsboro Committee for Founders Day was thrilled with the idea.

Mcloughlin is a member of the team Hot Tempered Steel and on July 6, during the Founders Day celebration in Wurtsboro, Mcloughlin pulled a 20,000-pound tractor-trailer rig down Fourth Street.

"This is not an easy thing to do," Mcloughlin said. There was nothing fabricated or modified about the rig provided for the pull by Gary Mann, owner of New York Truck Parts Inc. of Wurtsboro. It even had the fuel still in it.

Mcloughlin does a lot of training and practicing to be able to accomplish this sort of thing. "People sometimes give me trucks to use or I have to pay to use trucks for practices and that comes out of my pocket," Mcloughlin said. "I have done other pulls before but this one was big," Mcloughlin said, "because it was right in my community and it was for O'Toole's."

It was a brutally hot day and hundreds of people lined the street to see if this woman could actually pull a truck. For a couple of seconds, even Mcloughlin didn't think she could do it.

"As soon as I did the initial 'drop,' I knew something was wrong," Mcloughlin said. "I pulled with everything I had and it wasn't budging. I started to go over the checklist in my mind; the truck is in neutral, there's nothing in front of the tires and so on. Everything checked. I said to myself, 'Why isn't it moving?!'"

The crowd was loud at first but then grew quiet as Mcloughlin struggled against the straps hooked to the rig. "Even though I had my ear buds in listening to my hip-hop music, I could still hear my kids (Katie, 23, and Jason, 21) saying 'Mom, pull the truck!' I couldn't let all these people down."

Seems it was so hot that day that the tires of the rig had sunk into the blacktop, making it even more difficult for Mcloughlin to get the truck to do the initial roll.

Finally, with a couple of more strong pulls and a couple of choice words for the truck, the wheels began to turn. The crowd began to cheer and yell her name as she pressed on down the street with the rig rolling behind her. She had planned on pulling it no more than 60 feet, but Mcloughlin managed to pull it an unbelievable 100 feet. The cheers continued as her teammate, Lainie Sleppin, of Dover, N.J., pulled the O'Toole's work van with the trailer right behind her.

Mcloughlin will continue her training and practicing and she has already plans on doing another pull at next year's Founders Day, but this time it will be a rig with a sleeper and Sleppin will be pulling a regular rig.

O'Toole's is still in need of toys for its annual toy run. Mcloughlin is hoping more donations come in as word spreads about her successful feat.

Being involved in this kind of sport doesn't come without the negatives. Stares and harsh words from folks who don't fully understand why Mcloughlin does what she does hurt her a little, but she smiles, brushes it off and knows that she has a lot of friends and family who see her for who she is, a woman with a strong will and gentle, caring heart.

Mcloughlin and her team perform pulls for individual, corporate, large or small business charity drives and fundraisers. For more info email Hottemperedsteel@hotmail.com.

Mcloughlin is grateful to New York Truck Parts Inc. for the use of the truck. A documentary on Mcloughlin is being filmed by Kevin Burke Studios.